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Verifying Chinese Suppliers


Protect Yourself from China Scams: A Comprehensive Guide to Avoiding Online Fraud

trust in trade with China

There are a lot of online scams and online sales. This phenomenon is so frequent that two new ones are opened for one fraudulent shop caught and closed. Frauds are basically the sale of branded products, computers, laptops (iPod/iPhone), cameras and other electronics. funds. Scammers use everything they can just to get you to their online store, claiming to sell branded goods, new goods, claiming that their prices are low due to sales, giving you free shipping, etc. One of the most important things in business is certainly trust. No one wants to happen to buy a product and never receive it, and lose the invested money. This is a classic scam that exists everywhere in the world, including in China. We will try to build a network of trust on our site and thus reduce fraud of this type.

Ways of buying goods from China

There are generally three ways to purchase goods.

  1. The first way is to hire a company in China to help you find the goods, control the goods during loading and ensure their delivery,
  2. another way is to make purchases directly from Chinese companies from home, and
  3. the third way is to go to China and buy goods with personal control.

In the following text, we talk about the first two ways of purchasing.

Shopping with someone's help

If you want to order goods from China, our advice is to necessarily hire someone to help you. In this way, you get multiple help for little money. First and foremost is the safety of the work done, secondly, if you want, you can ask for a check of the quantity and quality of the goods before loading, and the third and most important thing is that you may be able to save money, since these companies can probably find the goods at favorable prices than you! !!

What should be contained in a well-formulated procurement letter

If you want us to help you and find the product for you, you need to provide the following information:

  • a more detailed description of the product with all the features and details it should satisfy (the more details the better, maybe a picture or a link where we can see the product)
  • the quantity you are interested in (the price per piece mainly depends on the size of the order)
  • prices per piece that you think would be profitable for you to buy from China (target price)

Without the above details hardly anyone will start searching for the product you want.

Example of bad letter

regards
how can we buy a concrete mixer?
regards
Axxxxx
0xxxxxxxx

Independent purchase

Of course, if you want, you can also contact the Chinese seller yourself, pay him and hope that everything will go well and that you will receive the ordered goods.

If you want to embark on this kind of adventure, don't say that we didn't warn you and that anything can happen. We often receive questions on our email such as: we paid for the goods but never received them, or we received goods that are of poor quality, etc. Be sure to beware of fraud during the third, fourth purchase from the same seller, when you gain trust in him and when you want to buy goods in larger quantities and for more money!

Our contribution to the verification of companies will be the marking of links on our site to companies that had web presentations at the time of placement on our site. Today you can see if they are still working and make sure if it is some kind of scam.

We know that a company's website, especially if it is only a presentation on one of the larger sites like Alibaba, is absolutely not enough. The company you want to cooperate with simply must have its own unique website. That is why only companies with a personal presentation are on our website. In order to start considering trade with a potential supplier, it is necessary to be WELL informed about him. In the past period since the Import from China website was created, we noticed that many links to companies disappeared even though they were correct when we set them up! Links to companies disappear for several reasons: carelessness of the company that allows their domain to expire, lack of interest of the company in the website, change of site, failure of the company, but most often it is a question of companies dealing with fraud. Fraudulent companies open a site, deceive a few visitors and close the site. That's why we introduce Year-godina, which indicates how long a link to a company has been on our site. This does not mean that the other companies that are not on our site are not valid, there are simply too many companies and we cannot add them all.

Tips

In communication with a possible future partner:

  1. never: curse, racially abuse, swear at something

  2. give your contact details which can only help with communication and cannot withdraw money from your bank account

  3. write as correctly as possible in English without slang or abbreviations. Do not forget that English is not the native language of the Chinese and that your interlocutor may not know English very well. This way you avoid the most common thing that happens in trade with the Chinese - misunderstanding due to what is lost in translation

  4. be as clear, thorough and precise as possible in details. the more information you share the better.

  5. use a company email instead of a free one like yahoo, gmail, etc. so that the Chinese partners would take you more seriously.

How to recognize a legal company?

1) Always send money to the company account.

Unlike many countries, China has a strict policy that every company must have its own bank account. It is the best indicator of whether a company is legitimate or not. Someone may wonder what the difference is between a personal account and a company account. Here is an example:

Beneficiary name: Zhou Jianming
Bank name: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
Account No.: 35000******** ************
Swift Code:ICBKBJHLJ

or

Beneficiary name: Harbin Freedom Energy Sootblowing Co., Ltd
Bank name: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
Account No.:35000** ******************
Swift Code: ICBKBJHLJ

it can be seen in the first example that Beneficiary name is a personal name and in the second it is the name of a company. Exporting companies should have a foreign currency account in addition to an ordinary account! Never pay anything to someone on your personal account in China, or you do so at your own risk!

2) The company's website reveals a lot!

  • Eliminate suppliers who don't have their own site! When accessing a supplier's site, check the following:
  • did they show the detailed address of the company or did they show it at all? Did they give the address of city A and the phone number of city B (and it happens) https://www.wayp.com/eng/china.htm  Chinese phone directory yellowpages online. You can check many companies and their information just by phone number. Unfortunately, China does not have a unique telephone directory on the Internet, at least not for now and as far as we know!
  • Stay away from companies that won't publish their address on their website!
  • check if the site has an about us page. Be very careful in doing business with a company that will not introduce itself!
  • search the internet for the url of their website+scam
  • a high ranking on Google is a good indicator, as is the date of establishment of the company and website
  • A website in Chinese and English is much more professional and an indication of seriousness in business. However, pay attention to Chinese sites that are only in English, we recommend that you avoid them!

The most reliable way to verify a company is through the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China.

Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China

If you have doubts about trading with a Chinese company, contact this ministry. You will receive an answer within 24 hours. They may not have answers to all your questions, but they will direct you to people or contacts who can help you. You also have the possibility to view numerous letters with questions and answers.

Website : http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/
Contact Online: http://gzly.mofcom. gov.cn

If you know the province where your supplier is located you should contact the Local Administration for Industry and Trade directly!

Local Administration for Industry and Trade

Here you can confirm the validity and confirm if the company is legally registered. You can also check if they have a foreign trade certificate. Only companies with this certificate can conduct foreign trade. If it turns out that the company you are checking is a fraudulent company, the local police then take action against the fraudsters.

If you are not satisfied with your previous search, contact the Local Administration for Industry and Trade. Each Chinese province has its own Administrative Bureau for Industry and Commerce. You can find the contact websites of these Bureaus by province here. or on the following links:

The problem is that many have to enter a verification code that includes Chinese characters!

If you do not know in which province your business partner is located or if you do not know some information needed to check their company, feel free to ask them and ask them to give you as much information as possible about their company. Your money is at stake!

You can also complain on the website of the Local Administration for Industry and Trade if something went wrong with the transaction

How to Check Hong Kong Offshore Companies

You have probably come across companies from Hong Kong whose addresses are in China, mostly in the southern parts of China (Guangdong province). These are the so-called Hongkong - offshore companies. The reasons of the Chinese for opening these companies are:

  1. Tax avoidance
  2. Hong Kong has looser business registration rules than China and is relatively inexpensive

The danger when trading with such companies is that they do not have a physical presence in Hong Kong, so if something goes wrong with the trade you have no one to turn to, and you are also not protected from China since you traded with a company from Hong Kong. These companies are difficult to detect and these are just some of the tips:

  • You can call them on the phone and check the area code, but be aware that the number may be diverted.
  • Visit them and see for yourself (safest)
  • Mostly they have accounts in small foreign banks
  • Check the company at the following address:  https://www.icris.cr.gov.hk/csci/

China Center for Mediation and Promotion of International Trade

If something goes wrong with your transaction and you have tried unsuccessfully to contact your business partner to resolve the problem then please contact the following address

Phone- +86-10-68080117
Email - flwangfang [ @ ]ccpit.org


Website - https://en.ccpit .org/

Link to check Chinese contract laws:

http://www.china.org.cn/

Further complaints

If you have clearly been scammed or believe you have been scammed, you should report the scam to your local police, as well as Internet Crime Center. This center is American, but no matter which country you report the fraud from, it can be registered in the database. On this site you can find all types of internet fraud and how to recognize them

I hope this information helps you!

To summarize - we divide companies into three categories

  1. Verified companies - are those companies with whom cooperation is long-termand correct

  2. Companies that partially fulfilled the agreement - are those companies that did not send you all the agreed goods, those companies with whom, due to some linguistic misunderstanding, the trade was not completed completely and properly.

  3. Companies to avoid - are those companies that engage in fraud or do business in a rude manner, asking you to pay extra for already paid goods, etc.

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